Elliott's Thoughts » social computing

Social Media Measurement – Part 2

Elliott — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 22:00:13 +0000

Yesterday we looked at BackType and how they monitor comments throughout the web. Today we’re going to look at another company called Radian6. Andrea Tarrant from Radian6, was able to answer a few questions that I sent over that will help give you some insight into what their company offers.

• Comments – scans blog for comment count

• Engagement – algorithm built in that captures number of unique commenters that have commented more than once and avg length of comment.

• Influence – captures all of these metrics

• Friends – n/a

• Followers – captures from twitter

• Downloads – You can export all of the information that is produced by the widgets (ex: posts from the River of News, graphs, etc.) except for
• individual posts (in the untitled media viewer).

• Favorites – there is no way as of now to “favorite” a post in the River of News, but you can mark the priority, the sentiment, add tags,
• etc. in the Workflow version of the River of News.

• Views - Captures view count from over 420 different video and image
• sharing sites (youtube, flickr)

• Votes - Captures vote counts from Dig, Delicious, and Readit

• Links - We will show you the on-topic inbound and outbound links in a site’s posts from the Influencer widget. We also give you links to other sites where an influencer would have a presence (Social Profile).

From all of the different features that Radian6 offers I find their ability to give you links to other sites where an user would have a presence or otherwise called a user’s “social profile” is a key component in monitoring and measuring your social media efforts. For instance, yesterday we talked about comments which are quintessential for monitoring and measuring your social media efforts however it’s hard to weigh a comment if you do not know anything about the user who left the comment.

As you can see below a user with a smaller “social profile might not have as much of an audience where their comments re valued.

A user with a limted social graph or "social profile"

Where in this picture user 2 has a much broader audience where or he/she can spread their thoughts to a much larger group of people.

A use with a much larger social graph or "social profile"

Initially you would weigh user 2′s comment heavier since it looks like they have a larger audience hence a larger influence. In some aspects this is true and you would definitively want to make sure you pay attention to people with a broad audience. Nevertheless, User 1′s audience may have more of an impact that user 2 simply because even though user 2 might have a large audience it does not mean that they have a major effect on that audience. User 1 might have a small social profile however the people that they are engaged with them have a deeper relationship then the relattionships of user 2 and hence user 1′s audience will take action due to their social actions and comments. The influence of a user is very important and Radion6 does a great job giving you a glimpse of that user’s influence however there are some additional tools that help you unveil this that I’ll discuss next.

Social Media Measurement- Part 1

Elliott — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 00:28:03 +0000

To start this social measurement series off I’m going to cover multiple services that can help a user monitor and create metrics for their social interactions. These tools can be used not only to monitor a specific user but to also measure competitors and social gurus involvement in social media.

The first tool that I will cover in this series is BackType (@backtype), which indexes comments from around the web. I was lucky to have Christopher Gold, founder of BackType, answer a few questions about his company.

How did this whole project start?

“We wanted to be able to follow comments written by the people we care about. It was easy to follow all the blog posts, videos, tweets, and other user-generated content, but there was no way to follow comments. Despite having much greater ambition for the service today, we created BackType to solve a very simple problem we were experiencing.”

Why did you choose indexing comments?

“We believe online conversations are an overlooked and increasingly important subset of information online. Commenting is a ubiquitous online activity that creates, in our opinion, incredibly valuable (meta)data. An individual comment or review may have little value or meaning — but aggregating millions of them creates lots of context for consumers. For example, comment-like data is one of the top drivers of purchase decisions. We saw an opportunity to organize that information.”

How can people leverage your program?

“BackType is primarily used as a toolset for comment authors, but it’s also used by companies for customer support, public relations, etc. We have a feature called “BackType Alerts” that notifies you whenever someone mentions a search term in comments on blogs and other social media. When existing and potential customers talk about your brand, products or services, it’s important that you see it, and when appropriate, respond accordingly.”

How it can compliment the use of other metrics?

“For both publishers and marketers, the number of comments in response or connection to content of interest is a good starting point for measuring engagement. However, there are many more forms of engagement that can be measured, analyzed, etc. All “social metrics” are complementary to each other — it just depends which ones are most valuable to you.”

Comments are about building community and simplistically provide a way for people to contribute to your community. Whether it’s a community that you are trying to build and/or an existing community that you are engaging in, this part of social measurement is vital because social media is dependent on engagement. Measurement of engagement is not limited to “how many comments” a user receives however each comment can lead to something more such as ideas for improvement, measurement of sentiment, and hopefully conversations. To show you how engagement can move beyond a comment people can Digg your post, bookmark it through social bookmarkings sites, stumble it, or even share it through Facebook or other existing social networking platforms.

As you can see monitoring comments to analyze your social media projects is not an all-encompassing solution. However it’s a starting point to what kind of “strong ties” you are making with your community. There are many other tools that can be used to measure comments and we’ll cover those later. Nevertheless, if you have the time try BackType because familiarizing yourself with this tool will help you understand how it can be leveraged in your niche. As we dive into the social measurement toolbox you will start to notice that each application is different in how they assess the social world.

Episode 2.1

Elliott — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 20:06:20 +0000

This episode we review blip.fm Ryan and I are both passionate about music and we love how blip.fm is using micro blogging to create a human search for music. Let us know your thoughts.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5d9H6oS5enk&hl=en&fs=1]

Episode 2

Elliott — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 20:01:23 +0000

In this episode of The Ryan and Elliott Show, I head out to Tahoe for some interviews and snowboarding. I hope you like what we’ve put together so far and if you have any suggestions let us know. The main point of this video is to show that the human element of social computing is one of the most vital. We have another clip coming in mid week so keep your eyes pealed.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwT5I2f-Bn4&hl=en&fs=1]

The Ryan and Elliott Show

Elliott — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 19:57:38 +0000

This post and the next few are for The Ryan and Elliott show that I have to catch up on. If you haven’t watched the show before The Ryan and Elliott Show is brought to you by Grand Canyon University. Ryan and I are two employees bringing you the latest and greatest of social computing, SEO and SEM. We try to mix it up and have fun with the content that we bring to the table

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eStqFiPfyVg&hl=en&fs=1]

Social Measurement Research

Elliott — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 22:32:50 +0000

Social measurement has been stealing the spotlight in the social computing industry from the beginning of the New Year. Discussion on authority and impact of users and grading such user profiles on individual platforms has lead to a handful of tools that have made their claim on social measurement. Over the next couple of weeks I’m going to be reviewing a variety of these tools and at the end of the research project compile a list of resources that one can use to help measure and leverage one’s social strategies.

I’m going to be looking at social measurement tools that look at;

• Social bookmarks
• Comments
• Engagement
• Influence
• Friends
• Followers
• Downloads
• Favorites
• Views
• Votes
• Links
• And a few more…

Not all measurement tools have their algorithms public or fully disclosed so I’ll compare them to other companies that claim to do relatively the same measurements and basically see if they pull different results and try to weigh the pros and cons of both results. If you have any suggestions or are a company yourself that would like to have your measurement tools reviewed please leave me a comment and contact information so we can talk. You can also contact me at the social networking sites under the “Follow Me” section of my blog.

MNC Typologies and Social Computing

Elliott — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 22:20:42 +0000

Multi National Companies (MNC) use a vast array of typologies to distribute their products, services, and ideas throughout the world. There are seven main typologies that MNCs use to conduct business around the world which include ethnocentric, polycentric, geocentric, multidomestic, global, international and transnational. Each typology has unique characteristics that help leverage a company’s business model overseas. What’s even more interesting these typologies can be directly related to strategies that organizations use with social computing.

Through studies the first three typologies (ethnocentric, polycentric & geocentric) are used more as a generic terms to describe MNCs. Ethnocentric organizations manage overseas operations directly primarily to protect the company’s competitiveness in the home market. “Communication and information is top down and all strategic decisions are steered from corporate headquarters. Subsidiaries sell products design and manufactured by parent companies with little or no local control.” (Odell, 2006) Ethnocentrism allows such organizations to streamline manufacturing processes while protecting their intellectual capital. This method is also used with organization sin how they release information throughout social computing platforms. Intellectual capital can constrain organizations ability to reach out and touch people through social computing. In contrast to an ethnocentric company polycentric organizations take more responsibility to adapting designs while customizing products to meet local needs. Unlike the ethnocentric management model a polycentric organization manages their subsidiaries as independent units with minimal influence from headquarters. According to Odell geocentric organizations define global markets and technology is transferred rapidly to sell more or less the same product worldwide maximizing economies of scale both in production and R&D. Organizations that are thriving right now in social media are using this tactic allowing community managers, social marketing strategist and their employees to operate more independently allowing greater transparency and relevancy of information to be transmitted through social channels.

Through many efforts to define types of MNCs four terms have been used across a variety of researchers to better define the typology of MNCs. These include multidomestic, global, international and transnational. Within these four typologies they have been broken into three subsets to weigh the pros and cons of each. These subsets are organizational design, local responsiveness and interdependence.

Organizational design varies from all typologies. According to Harzing a decentralized network was most commonly seen in transnational strategies however the major difference of decentralized and centralized networks only seemed significant between transnational and global companies. Meaning that multidomestic, international and transnational use intersubsidiary organizational designs to pipeline their products or service while Global companies are quite the opposite. However common multidomestic, international and transnational companies set up their subsidiaries transnational organizations are vastly different from the other typologies because they have no specific allegiance to one country.

To further distinguish these typologies local responsiveness is taken under consideration. Looking at all four typologies the major differences where between multidomestic, transnational and global MNCs. “Conforming to our expectations, however, adaptation of marketing was higher for subsidiaries of Transnational and Multidomestic companies than for subsidiaries of Global companies” (Harzing, 2000) This seems to be pretty straight forward since global companies interject their products and ideas with little concern with the local communities. They simply believe in the idea that the consumers will either like the product or not. Even though this might seem like a harsh business practice it allows global companies leverage economies of scale within their operations.

Interdependence is the final subgroup that Harzing uses to differentiate the multiple typologies for MNCs. “Further, as predicted, the level of dependence, that is dependence on headquarters for purchases and sales, is highest for subsidiaries of Global companies and lowest for subsidiaries of Multidomestic companies, while subsidiaries of Transnational companies fall between these two extremes” (Harzing, 2000) Dissecting the interdependence of the subsidiaries with their headquarters give crucial insight to the typologies of MNCs. Understanding the type of relationship that international subsidiaries have with their headquarters allows opens up a MNC to how their operations are really conducted. These typologies and help an organization make conscious decisions on how they interact with people throughout social computing. Social computing has opened up the world for consumers and companies to interact. It is no longer massive conglomerates that can touch the other side of the world. Small, mid to large companies are now playing on a world wide level and assessing your organizational structure and strategy to interact with an eclectic market needs to take place to leverage social computing.

Why Relationships?

Elliott — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 22:03:25 +0000

          The business world has change substantially through the ages. The twenty-first century heralds ever-increasing chaos in world relationships, economies, and geopolitical events. “Some researchers believe the significance of this period in humankind’s history has not been seen since the Industrial Age some 500 years ago” (Daft, R.L.). Today’s modern world of globalization, advancing technologies, outsourcing, shifting economical dominance, economic uncertainty, widespread ethical scandals, wars and terrorism all lead to a period of transformational and fundamental shifts that have and will continue to significantly impact organizations. These shifts will substantailly alter how organizations conduct business and leadership models. Traditional paradigms focusing on stability or the status quo have outlived their usefulness. They are ineffective in meeting the rapid environmental challenges of these chaotic times. To be successful, organizational leaders must develop new approaches to meet challenges of “a world characterized by randomness and uncertainty” (Daft, R.T.). The implementation of social computing may be a catalyst for this change however it is only a small part in the evolution organization behavior.
          With social computing and the paradigm shift in organizational leadership new leadership models must arise. Implementing relational leaders is vital in leveraging social computing and diversity in an organization “Relationships between leaders and follows are seldom built when emotional connections cannot be developed. Power lies in getting close to others and doing what is best for others” (Daft, 2008. p. 260). Since the 1970s, leadership theories have evolved a focus on the interpersonal competencies of leaders. While cognitive abilities such as intelligence, problem analysis, and logic are important skills, these studies suggest effective leadership is augmented by emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence consists of four components self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management. These components include several aspect of introspective and people-oriented skills, including “emotional self-awareness and control, morality and integrity, and empathically and service-oriented behaviors” (Daft, R.T.). Leaders who have relationship management competencies demonstrate attributes of compassion, sensitivity, and kindness. They focus on the needs of the followers as well as collaborative networks internally and externally to achieve organizational objectives. Leveraging diversity in an organization a leader must possess these skills. The latter of leadership theories do not address the leader’s ability to meet individual needs while building trust and compassion between the leader and their followers.
           Effective relationship management will results in greater reciprocal benefits in the leader-follower dyad. Servant Leaders understand effective followership is essential to organizational objectives and achievements. Leaders that foster environments that increases follower’s critical independent thinking and rewards active participation in organizational endeavors increase follower’s power as well as overall effectiveness of the organization. A leader must be able to develop their followers in these ways no matter their follower’s race, religion or cultural background. Servant leaders create barrier-less environments where personal growth, learning and self-management leadership, others leading themselves, are present. An important aspect of relational management and effective leadership is to help followers see themselves as important components of organizational strategy. More than individuals who simply follow directives and instruction, effective leadership creates an environment where followers understand the vision and goals and independently align their behaviors to achieve objectives. For this to happen, leaders must be “worthy of trust, envision the future of the organization, inspire other to contribute and be capable and effective in matters that will affect the organization” (Daft, R.T.). A transformational leader must go above and beyond and reach into the depths of their followers and allow them to become a self sustaining force “transformational leaders usher in revolutionary change” (Cox, Jr. T.) A transformational leader leveraging diversity must not only lead their followers but teach them how to lead themselves. Self organization and self leading teams have been neglected from prior leadership practices. Most of all to leverage social computing these leadership practices must be in place.
           The complexity of today’s business environment has outgrown traditional leadership paradigms of the past. Nowadays, more and more leadership theories are focusing on the important component of the leader-follower dyad in assessing the requirements of effective leadership. Research indicates relational leadership theories, including emotional intelligence and interpersonal relations between leaders and followers, are foundational to success. As seen in the leadership initiatives seen in today’s business environment require a mixing of leadership forms depending on the organizational objectives and the needs of the followers. Leadership is the ability to influence others to align their behaviors with a shared vision. Studies suggest the situational and relational models of leadership are more successful in meeting follower’s needs and increasing effective followership to accomplish organizational objectives. Moreover studies in relational leadership are unearthing findings that to develop and lead effective followers a leader must serve first. These findings in leadership theory should not only be applied to face-to-face interaction they need to applied to online and especially social computing relationships.

Cox Jr., T. (2001). Creating the multicultural organization. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Daft, R.L (2008). The leadership experience. 4th Ed. Mason, OH: Southwestern

Social Computing & Emotional Intelligence

Elliott — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 02:49:13 +0000

Within social computing and the internet in general intelligence is highly regarded but little research has been done investigating the value of emotional intelligence (EI). Reviewing contemporary leadership theories emotional intelligence is breaking new ground on how self cognition plays into leading others. This new wave of thought is highly applicable to the evolving social computing industry.

Emotional intelligence is redirecting the preconceived conceptions of leadership theory. “Emotional intelligence refers to a person’s ability to perceive, identify, understand, and successfully manage emotions in self and others” (Daft, R.L.). With the new found attentiveness of emotional intelligence leadership theory is reverting to a micro view. In this micro view of leadership theory scholars and leaders themselves are realizing the importance of self-awareness. “Self-awareness might be considered the basis of all the other competencies. It includes the ability to recognize and understand your own emotions and how they affect your life and work” (Daft, R.L.). These studies are showing that people that have a high level of self-awareness are more inclined to guide their own lives and the others around them.

With the up rise of social computing technologies relational models are being put to the test since the definitive line of professional and personal life within are being blurred. Companies, power users, and upcoming leaders are realizing that a more personal route must be taken to influence their followers. Leveraging emotional intelligence to lead has developed a new relational model contradicting traditional leadership models.

But do we dare talk about personal touch? Caring for people? Or even love? Daft has the best description of what love can be referred to in a professional atmosphere “Love in the workplace means genuinely caring for others and sharing one’s knowledge, understanding, and compassion to enable others to grow and succeed” (Daft, R.L.). In fusing this kind of leadership model in the work place breaking the traditional mold. Previously it was taboo to talk about “love” in the workplace. However leaders that are using love to lead are finding that they have an incredible amount of influence. “When leaders address these subtle emotional needs directly, people typically respond by loving their work and becoming emotionally engaged in solving problems and serving customers” (Daft, R.L.). As social computing evolves it will be very interesting how leadership theory grows. This will be a personal pursuit to follow, document and measure if emotional intelligence and utilizing “love” to lead grow in importance with the increasing saturation of social computing within the workplace.

Daft, R. L. (2008). The Leadership Experience (4^th ed.). Cincinnati, OH: South-Western. ISB

13: 9780324539684